


For Those I Love

by I_Skavinsky_Skavar



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Captain Steve Rogers: Agent of SHIELD, Coulson Lives, In which Sharon Carter is Sharon Coulson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 22:23:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Skavinsky_Skavar/pseuds/I_Skavinsky_Skavar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil Coulson is dead. He is mourned. He is remembered. He is actually not dead.</p><p>Meanwhile, Steve gets along with his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Those I Love

**['I would die for those I love'](http://www.houseofnames.com/coulson-family-crest) **

**\- Coulson family motto**

 

He signed the cards, every last, blood-flecked one of them, and slipping them into the coffin earlier, Steve regretted that he hadn't done it sooner; that at the time, uneasy with his surroundings and dreading coming events as he was, he had thought of signing them as a chore to be eventually performed, something he had to do to placate an over-friendly stranger.

The coffin is a good one, or so Steve was told. He heard the words "timber" and "oak" and something about rope. Stark wanted to go all out and get a top-of-the-line casket made of solid mahogany. Agent Barton explained that a fallen agent is buried in a coffin paid for with a collection taken from his friends and colleagues. Stark didn't like it,  said that he refused to accept the departed being defined as was one of 'those people'. It took Agent Romanoff to talk him into changing his mind.

Phil Coulson was a veteran; once a Captain in the 82nd Airborne seeing combat over twenty years ago in Kuwait. The coffin is covered with the flag, and each of the six men carrying it is in uniform. Among them is Steve, who received this replacement uniform the same minute Agent Hill informed him –as opposed to requested- that he was going to be one of Coulson’s pallbearers, because Coulson is worth it.

Ahead of Steve is Fury, who’d been a Colonel in the Army Special Forces, and behind Steve is Barton, who’d been a Staff Sergeant in the Marines. The other three men, he doesn’t know beyond that they’re not with SHIELD, and one of them, a Sergeant Major, purports that is only walking thanks to the departed.

They set the coffin down by the open grave and each take hold of the flag by the edge. They fold lengthwise, and twice more, then fold the end into a triangle, and again until it ends in Fury's hands.

He hands it to Hill, who clad in a buttoned down black coat, presents it to one of the attendees, a willowy blonde woman of her late twenties, similarly dressed and similarly stoic. Steve wonders briefly who she is, thinking she’s a bit young to be Coulson’s cellist.

They lower the coffin into the ground with black cords, and the proceedings get underway. Steve scans the crowd of mourners to see some familiar faces. Stark and his companion, Ms. Potts, stand shoulder-to-shoulder, dressed well though visibly distraught. Thor attends conservatively dressed in a black suit and an overcoat, carrying an ornate walking stick. Doctor Selvig and Doctor Banner looks mildly uncomfortable. Natasha, in what is to Steve an unprecedented display of warmth, squeezes the mystery blonde's forearm comfortingly. The woman smiles faintly in appreciation.

Barton must have notice Steve looking, because he says, only loud enough to be heard by Steve over the priest's words,

"That's Phil's daughter."

"Thought he wasn’t married."

"Widower."

Both have the sense to say nothing further as the service goes on, and stand in in silence unable, the priest’s voice drowned out by thoughts of the utter finality of the fact that a good man is gone.

Afterwards, when the priest has left and the mourners have begun to scatter, Steve shakes the woman's hand and offers his condolences. She nods appreciatively and thanks him.

Her palms are slightly calloused and her grip is firm. There is a sense of familiarity as she departs with Barton and Romanoff, who he overheard call her _Sharon._

 

 

He's seen the sky open and forces literally out of this world pour out to annihilate and subjugate, and it’s now over and it’s business as usual. The Avengers have scattered, more or less. Stark couldn't disappear if he tried to, Banner headed North, Thor is off-world, Barton and Romanoff are on sabbatical, and Rogers is out there of a motorcycle, doing the Easy Rider thing.

Nick Fury can’t go on sabbatical, because he lives and breathes the job, and because the myriad of lesser perils threatening the world don’t stop when an alien invasion comes or fails. In fact, he can’t visit the Icepick in person before weeks pass and he gets a call giving him a reason to.

The Icepick is a hospital of sort. Situated in Massachusetts, it is one of twenty-eight SHIELD facilities in the United States, built by black budget funds, that only Nick Fury knows about. The staff there perform extreme forms of medicine, using radical techniques with roots that the world at large doesn't want to know about. In there, they make sure certain people get to live on, no matter what the cost, because certain people need deserve to live on, and the world needs them.

Phil Coulson is one of those people.

When Fury gets there, not only is Coulson awake and lucid, he’s doing physical rehab excercises, and from the looks of him he could be walking out the door and back on the job, though the doctor tells him it’ll be another week before that is an option.

Fury fills him in on the stuff that Coulson already sort of figured out for himself; bad guy lost, good guys won. He tells him who was KIA, who was getting an early retirement, he tells him about how Captain Rogers managed to hold the line. Then he drops the bombshell.

"The world thinks you're dead." Says Fury, his voice soft, but otherwise devoid of any semblance of regret, "We had a funeral and everything.”

“Oh.” Coulson sounds as he sits down with a towel around his neck and a bottle of mineral water in his hand. He wipes the sweat off his brow, feeling a hot, pinching sensation at the base of his neck that’s supposedly the medication.

"Who knows I'm alive?"

"Aside from the staff? Just me."

"Not even Hill?" Coulson asked before realizing a greater exclusion, "Wait, not even Sharon?"

This time Fury does seem regretful.

"Right before the attack, they were about to walk." Fury spoke softly, "They found out about 'Phase Two', and they were already at each other's throats and… Your death pulled them together. But then the battle was won and it was peacetime and they still thought you were dead. And you _were_ dead, Coul. The thread you were hanging by was hanging by a thread of its own. I couldn't give them… I couldn't give _her_ any false hope."

Coulson stares out the window at a cloudy sky and some sort of tree that he can’t identify and doesn’t say a thing. It’s been weeks, spent by his little girl thinking he’d died.

"Looks like I’m gonna live." Says Coulson, “When can we start telling people?”

Fury bows his head.

“Not now.”

“What are you talking about.”

"I have reasons to believe without a shadow of a doubt that World Security Council has been infiltrated by the Zodiac group. I need you on this."

“You’re kidding me.” Coulson says after he blinks.

"This is big. The Council and I had a bit of a falling out. I'm getting to keep my job for now, but they've got over a barrel, keeping a close eye on things. They find out I've been sniffing around them, it's over. This needs to be beyond covert. Everyone thinks you're dead, and that's why it can only be you, Coul."

Coulson takes a deep breath and closes his eyes for a moment before opening them again.

"An op like this will take a stretch." Says Coulson.

"Most likely a year. Maybe more."

"And everyone has to be kept in the dark?"

"I'm sorry."

"No… I understand, Nick.”

Coulson brushes his face with his hands, runs a hand through his hair, takes a deep breath.

“Don't worry, I'm your man."

"You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

They sit in absolutely silence for another minute, before Coulson speaks again,

"Chief."

"Yeah?"

"Is there something you're not telling me?"

"Yeah." Fury begins sheepishly, "It's your trading cards. I, uh, I got blood all over them."

"What?" Coulson asks, looking blankly.

"I really wanted to bring the point home with Rogers, so I smeared your blood all over them. You know… for effect."

Coulson stares Fury right in the eye, deep into his very soul, and after a moment Fury does something he doesn’t often do; he looks away.

Coulson sighs as he uncaps the bottle, raises it to his lips, and before drinking, growls,

"Motherfucker."

 

 

Three months after riding out of New York on his motorcycle, Steve Rogers comes riding back in.

SHIELD rents a place for him in Red Hook, or used to, he doesn’t know what’s happened with it.  So he heads right forr SHIELD's Manhattan headquarters at 46th and Broadway. He parks outside, walks up the steps toward the lobby doors, and draws the suspicious attention of incoming and outgoing agent. It isn’t that he’s been gone for some time, it’s that people often have a hard time recognizing him. Usually they expected someone older, taller, and bulkier, but this time it’s that he’s packing a week’s worth of road dirt, with his last shave being a month ago and his last haircut before the invasion.

Clint Barton happens to be standing in the lobby, waiting for an elevator. He cranes his neck to see what initially assumed is a well built filthy hippie is a weather-beaten leather jacket. His eyebrows rise as Steve recognizes him and greets him with a nod.

"Agent Barton."

"Captain Rogers?" asks Barton as his eyes narrow, "You look like shit."

Steve gives a small chuckle as he shakes Barton's hand.

"Well, you look much better."

"Yeah, my days as a brainwashed pawn of an evil alien overlord are behind me. I assume you’re here for the boss?"

"Something like that."

"Okay." Clint nods as he looks Steve up and down, "Maybe I'd better take you up."

An hour, a shower, a shave and a change of clothes later, Steve is sitting in an armchair before the director's desk inside Fury's office, which has the air conditioning turned down to a chilling degree. Fury himself is behind the desk, reclining in his massive leather-bound chair as he puts out his Cuban cigar.

"Nice to see you made it back in one piece." Says Fury with a smirk.His way of putting people at ease is by appearing obnoxious, which oddly works. It was when he was being genial that people clenched up, "Did you have fun doing the whole Kerouac thing?"

"You can say that." Steve says as he nods. He's learned to brush off all those references everyone is so keen on making.

"Glad to hear it. Where'd you go? Grand Canyon? Mount Rushmore?"

"Sure. I spent a couple of weeks in San Francisco, too. On the way back I camped for a week in Yosemite Park. Saw Hoover dam. Niagra falls were beautiful."

"Yosemite Park?" Fury asks as he furrows his eyebrows. The surveillance detail mentioned nothing about that. And then Steve gives him an amused look and cocks his head.

"Huh." Fury says, smirking with genuine amusement, "Okay. I see what you did there."

"I'm not such a big fan of being watched all the time."

"Few people are, kiddo." Fury says as he reaches for the bottom drawer and pulls out a bottle that he places on the table, "Bourbon?"

"It's nine in the morning." Steve points out as Fury reaches back down for glasses.

"Is that a no?"

"Not really."

"Ah, I knew I liked you for a reason."

Fury pours two glasses pushes one gently across the desk's surface to within Steve's reach before he leans back and picks up his own.

"So have you considered my offer?" Fury asks before taking a sip.

"I have indeed." Says Steve, holding his glass and contemplating the copper color of the drink within.

"And I can tell you've made a choice. You're gonna say 'yes', but first you're going to be coy about it."

"Am I?"

"Yes." Says Fury, his smug smirk returning, "It's fine. I like sweet-talking a girl before getting her into bed."

Steve gives a small, joyless chuckle as Fury begins,

"You're not career-military, you enlisted out of a sense of duty. You're a fit, physically and mentally. A young man who has come into an amount of wealth in the form of decades of backpay from the DOD. You could do whatever you want; go to college, perhaps pursue your long-suspended artistic aspirations, maybe even meet a girl and settle down. You could transition back to being a civilian, at long last. But you won’t.

"You're a soldier." Fury says as he set his glass down on the table, "You didn't think you would, but you liked the action. Maybe not the combat or the killing, but you like strategizing, you like the thrill of being under fire, and you live to fight the good fight."

Steve takes his first sip right then, keeping his eyes on Fury as he does so, and then says,

"The Avengers fight the good fight."

"Of course. Stark is setting up at that tower of his, and with his money and resources, you won't longer need be a SHIELD operation in any form. You could move into the tower like Doctor Banner and Thor."

"Thor is back?"

"He is. Apparently they used the Tesseract to rebuild their rainbow bridge. Anyway, you could rejoin the Avengers. You could play houseguest to Tony Stark, spend all of your time with him, learn to put up with his… everything. All while you sit tight and wait for the next alien invasion, or for JARVIS to go Skynet. _Or_ , and this is just a thought, you could not spend your days hanging around Stark's cool kid clubhouse and get a job instead. Taking care of problems before they escalate into global threats. Problems like…"

Fury pauses to tap the surface of his computer screen, and then begins to enumerate,

"Transian ultranationalists trying to instigate a conflict with Latveria. The Hand and the Maggia fighting an international gang-war over the bootleg Iron-Tech game. The Beyond Corporation's insane broccoli weapons programs. Or AIM deploying MODOC squads in Madripoor. And… Oh, look at that, some ex-KGB personnel have been setting up a private sector Red Room.”

Steve watches Fury turn back to him, and wonders if this is a show the director had rehearsed.

"Rogers, these are problems of the type that can't to be smashed at with a hammer, but need to be sliced apart with a scalpel."

Steve takes a sip as he considers.

"'A stiletto to the heart'" Steve says, quoting a Polish spy he used to work with, "And you think that's why I'll join SHIELD? To be a cloak and dagger type?"

"No, I'm saying that you could make a good cloak and dagger type. But that's not the reason you're gonna join SHIELD."

Steve placed his glass, half-full, on Fury's desk.

"Well why will I?"

"Because you think I'm a weasel with a little too much power." Fury states mater-of-factly with an open-mouthed smirk, "And you would rather be on the inside, keeping an eye on me."

Steve purses his lips and nodded.

"Well, that's true."

"So,” Fury says with a grin, leaning forward, almost as if he really is trying to seduce a woman, “My place or yours?"

 


End file.
